Daughter
These are stories about our eldest daughter.
She wants to play guitar in a rock band. She wants to surf and ride skateboards, sell her art in the plaza, become a scientist and play football with the boys. She loves riding her bike through the forest even as the bats and ghosts and witches give chase. Run!
She’s got a great solution to litter: pick it up!
"Watch out, boys!"
My eldest daughter wants to play football.
So I took the eight year old with her brother, six, to have a go at a summer football clinic in Pinamar, where we are spending the summer on the coast of Argentina.
She put on her Argentina jersey, so did her brother and their younger sister, who is three. She tagged along with her own ball to have a play with daddy while the others trained.
I looked at my eldest daughter, a die-hard fan of Argentina and Carlos Tevez.
She was jumping up and down, warming her legs for the session.
I smiled nervously. I wanted to warn her about the machismo in Argentina, her own country, and that the boys might not want to play with a girl. They may not pass to a girl and they may tackle her just as if she was a boy, and it may hurt. [click to continue reading…]
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"Hey, we'll chat tonight."
THE PHONE RANG and it was a young girl on the other end. She asked to speak with my eight-year-old daughter, who was in bed. It was 10:20 p.m. on a school night.
That’s late but not that late in Buenos Aires where bars, cafes and restaurants can bustle until after midnight even on weeknights.
I hesitated. I’d not heard the girl’s voice before. She wasn’t a schoolmate I knew, who I could call by name and ask how things were going, how their parents were doing.
This was a new voice, a new friend. What on earth do I say? And at 10:20 p.m.? Do I mortify my daughter by saying she’s in bed? Do I say, “It’s past her bedtime young lady and you should be in bed too?” Or do I play it hip and say, “Yeah, we’ve just got in from the movies and, well, let me see if she’s available.” [click to continue reading…]
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"Come on. Let's Pogo."
MY ELDEST DAUGHTER ran up to my wife the other day and beamingly declared that she’d reached level eight on her pogo stick.
My wife looked puzzled.
“Level eight, you know. I did 80 bounces without stopping,” the eight-year-old said.
“Oh, okay,” Mum answered.
The pogo stick, of course, is not virtual. It is real. It’s the terminology she used that is high-tech, learned from friends and the world of PlayStation, Xbox and Wii. My three children don’t play video games. Not yet. My eldest daughter has had a run on her cell phone. Yes, a cell phone. Her grandparents bought it for her in England. It doesn’t work in Argentina as a phone. And she lost the recharging cable so alas no more Tetris or whatever else she was playing. She’s only got non-electronic toys – and the terminology of games consoles.
[click to continue reading…]
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